Benicio Del Toro Talks To Latina About Che, Broodingly

Benicio del Toro lends his special brand of slovenly, squinty hotness to Latina magazine’s February ‘09 cover. The Puerto Rican actor talks about his role in the 137.4 hour-long Steven Soderbergh film, Che.

He also talks a bit about his path to stardom, the challenges he faced as Che’s co-producer in his effort to get the movie made and in theaters and… his views on Che being labeled a terrorist.

Benicio got his first taste of acting as a student in a Pennsylvania boarding school. He was sent abroad by his father when his son proved to be a trompoloco comemierda. Benicio worked his way up from a TV role in “Miami Vice” to his latest role in a remake of The Wolfman, and along the way developed a reputation for being one of the hardest working - and most devoted - of method actors. Benicio has packed on pounds and has even been rumored to have burned himself with cigarettes in order to get into the skin and mindset of a particular character. 

He credits actors who came before him, like Andy Garcia, Raul Julia and Edward James Olmos, for paving the way for Latino actors in Hollywood. When it came to making Che, Benicio made the most of his tenacity and reputation to get the controversial movie onto American screens, describing the film’s pre-production to “pushing a piano up the Empire State building.”  Probably because not too many movie studios are terribly keen on pouring money into four hour long biopics filmed mostly in Spanish. Once the film was completed, distributed and shown to critics, Benicio had to deal with allegations of sugar-coating Che’s legacy:

He believed in the death penalty, no doubt. But I remember Che being included in a TV show that showed pictures of terrorists. I  was like, “Why isn’t Nixon there for the Vietnam War?” You’d have to put a lot of pictures of other people before you’d put Che’s. [...] We tell stories about Batman, and he was a type of Batman. No one can deny that he was trying to stop man exploiting man, whether he was successful or not.

We’ll leave this one up to you guys. Make sure to read the full article in Latina, but, in the mean time, tell us: What do you think about Benicio’s response to the movie’s critics? 

Benicio del Toro [Latina]